SOURCE: "John Drinkwater," in Some Contemporary Dramatists, Kennikat Press, Inc., 1925, pp. 53-72.

In the following essay, Sutton compares Drinkwater's historical plays to Greek drama.

It was as a poet that John Drinkwater first became known to readers, and it was in Birmingham, as actor and as manager of the Repertory Theatre, that he made his stage reputation. The experience he had in Birmingham taught him the craft of playmaking; and Abraham Lincoln, the chronicle which was brought to London by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, and afterwards went all over the world, was the distinguished result. He has never written novels; but his work, for the theatre has been supplemented by a number of biographies—one of Pepys, written in the old home of the Pepys family at Brampton, one of John Hampden, and a particularly good one of Charles James Fox—all of which have had their own...